Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean—the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Even without identifying narration with falsification, one must admit that a vast amount of our life narration is fictional—how much, we cannot tell.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Being human isn’t something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
One of the essential functions of science fiction, I think, is precisely this kind of question-asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Anyhow, what the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Huck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend.
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Mr. Hudson’s summary of the material is elegant, and his interpretation of it is, I take it, Freudian. Dreamwork is rationalization, therefore it is falsification: a cover-up. The mind is an endless Watergate. Some primitive “reality” or “truth” is forever being distorted, lied about, tidied up. But what if we have no means of access to this truth
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People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
The integrity of a piece of language, poetry or prose, is a function of its quality; and an essential element of its quality is the inseparability of idea and language. When a thing is said right it is said right, whether in prose or poetry, formal discourse or cursing the cat. If it is said wrong, if it lacks quality, if it is stupid poetry or car
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He is not my wife; but he brought to marriage an assumption of mutual aid as its daily basis, and on that basis you can get a lot of work done.